


In the Cards

by SylvanWitch



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Darkfic, Gen, canon-compliant (sort of), post-DH
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-24 00:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/628261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has a secret about Severus Snape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Cards

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted on 6 January 2008 on my LJ as a belated response to DH. Brought to you by the snakes in my brain.

“This card,” she said, tapping a yellowed, crooked nail against the worn, oversized card, “signifies stagnation and slow death.”

 

Try as he might, Harry couldn’t see it.  Mostly, it looked like the comic-book conception of the grim reaper, and he was hardly likely to be frightened by that.  He’d seen the real thing up close, after all, too many times to bear remembering now.

 

“You aren’t living up to your potential, either.”

 

Bad news, all of it, though about what he’d expected when Ron had pushed him to enter the musty canvas tent.  The ground beneath his chair was spongy with the wear of many feet, grass gone to mud where uncertain feet had shuffled while the querents listened to the card reader.

 

Her face was obscured—thank gods for small blessings, Harry figured--and her voice was the creaking of tent-lines in high winds or old crows that clung to branches in a gale and cried out their discontent.

 

“Who’ve you abandoned, then?” she asked, importunate, voice suddenly clearer, sharp in the twilight gloom of the tent’s interior.

 

Harry spared her a bored glance.  Is this the best she could do?

 

“His name,” and she paused.  Harry could see her head cant to one side, thought her eyes might be closed.  “The hissing of snakes.”

 

Long used to hiding in plain sight, Harry stilled his breath and made no show of how close she’d come to knowing, but suddenly he was unaccountably uncomfortable.

 

This muggle fraud could hardly know about…

 

It didn’t bear thinking.

 

“I smell…sulfur and bitter herbs and something else.”  She spat suddenly, face leaning forward into the scant light put out by a smoky oil lamp hanging in the corner nearest the tent flap.  “Sickly sweet, it is.  Wrong, whatever the case.  Who is he, boy?”

 

He noted the present tense at the same moment he saw her hand snaking forward, striking fast for his sleeve.  With quidditch-quick reflexes, he snatched his arm backward, came up out of the chair, which tipped over and fell with a dull sound on the scant remains of grass.  The table spilled forward as she surged toward him and a single card slid into the mire where his feet had been.

 

The hanged man, reversed.

 

Harry turned and fled, her cackle chasing him out of the door.

 

“Harry, what is it?  You’re white as a sheet?  Did the old gypsy raise a ghost?”  Ron meant it to be funny, but at Harry’s unchanging expression, Ron fell silent, scanned the fairgrounds for a familiar mane of wild hair, and sighed inwardly with relief to see Hermione approaching them from a nearby concession.

 

“Harry, what’s wrong?” Hermione asked, noting his pallor.  When she got no answer, she turned to Ron.  “What is it, Ron?”  Her eyes took in their surroundings with sharp suspicion, and she moved closer to the two, almost herding them, her hand hovering near her jumper sleeve, where Ron knew she kept her wand at the ready.  

 

They might be out of the war now, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t danger, even here in the bucolic setting of the Lake District, which had been chosen, apparently, because Hermione had always liked some muggle poet named Coleridge.

 

“Harry’s been to the card reader,” Ron answered, though it wasn’t much as explanations go.

 

“Oh, Harry,” Hermione’s tone shifted to affectionate incredulity.  “Did she foresee your death?  Prophesy that something terrible was going to happen?  I should think you’d had quite enough of that for one lifetime.  They’re all frauds, you know.”

 

But her smart smile melted away to see Harry’s vacant look, and when she noticed the thin sheen of sweat that had broken across his lip, she took his arm above the wrist and shook it a little.  “Harry, what is it?  I’m sorry I laughed.  Tell me what it is.”

 

But the young man only shook his head and began to walk away, stride gaining in length and speed as he went, so that he had quickly outstripped his surprised companions, who had to jog to catch him up.

 

“Harry, wait up!” Ron called, reaching out for the other man’s shoulder.  

 

As though he’d sensed it coming, Harry ducked the hand and spun to his left, towards the parking lot and the car that they’d liberated from Muggle Artifacts behind Arthur’s back.  The Ministry was in such chaos that it hardly mattered what they took, particularly since they intended to bring it back, and so unprepossessing was the ancient Triumph Herald 1200 that it was hardly likely to get them noticed.  Besides, its only remaining magic seemed to involve playing nothing but forties war tunes on the radio, a rather perplexing feature—perplexing, since the car had been built in 1969—they’d learned to ignore.

 

He was there before them, leaning stiffly against the bonnet.  Hermione had the keys, as she had refused to let Ron drive ( _You’ll kill us all, and we’re supposed to be relaxing!_ ), and she hastened to unlock the doors.  Harry slid into the backseat without a word, and though she and Ron exchanged a worried look, she didn’t let it delay her from getting them under way.

 

With false cheer, she said, “Where to, Harry?”

 

“I need to make a call,” he replied in a voice so subdued that it could hardly be heard over the Andrews Sisters singing “White Cliffs of Dover” for what had to be the fifteenth time that day.

 

“To the flat, then?” Ron asked.  They’d rented a place in the village, two bedrooms over a Fish and Chips shop, private walk-up and no near neighbors, since it was the off-season.

 

Harry shook his head.  “Drop me at the post office.”  
  
Hermione pinned him with a strange look in the rearview, but Harry didn’t seem to notice—or if he did, he didn’t care.  Ron half-turned in his seat as though to say something, but Harry’s expression was so distant and odd that the words died on Ron’s lips and he slumped back into his seat with a quiet sigh.

 

They arrived at the post office moments later, the town being hardly big enough for a proper drive, and Ron got out to let Harry exit.  “Will you be alright?” he asked quietly, unable to let his friend go without at least trying to penetrate Harry’s painful silence, which had become characteristic in the weeks since the war had ended.

 

Harry gave Ron only an inscrutable look and the barest jerk of his head, intended, Ron guessed, for an affirmative, and then he stalked off toward the post office without looking back.  

 

Ron slid into the car, and Hermione and he watched Harry round the stone building before she put the car into gear and pulled back out into the street.  

 

“Should we wait for him, do you think?” Ron asked, already knowing the answer.

 

Hermione just kept driving.

 

Once he’d heard the Herald wheeze away, Harry walked back out onto the street and took the west road leading out of town.  Perhaps a mile beyond the crumbling stone wall that marked the border of the village proper, there was a small cemetery, soft stones washed to smooth, blank faces by years of driving rains and wind.  

 

In the center of the cemetery stood an ancient oak, its wide branches spreading out to the very edges of the cemetery, which were marked with a rusty wrought-iron fence that made its uncertain way around the perimeter of the property.  Ignoring the gate, which hung half off of its hinges by a thick chain and a padlock, Harry vaulted the fence with familiar ease and walked to the far side of the oak, where its wide bole blocked him from view of anyone who might pass by on the sparsely-used road.

 

He crouched in the loam between two enormous, knotty roots, and drew a sigil in the damp earth.  Taking from his pocket a certain mixture of herbs, he blew them over the sigil gently and breathed a few words into the quiet afternoon air.

 

There was a crack like thunder, and before him appeared a stationary cloud of pearlescent gray smoke that gave to the air a mirage-like quality.  Into this cloud came a face that it made Harry ache to see.  Loneliness so hungry grew up in him at the sight of the long, pale face and hooked nose and sharp black eyes and lank black hair Harry thought he might make a fool of himself.

 

Instead, he said only, “There’s one here who might know.”

 

“Who?”  No alarm, and that made Harry feel a little better, made the breath squeezed through his tightened throat ease into his lungs with more effect.

 

“A muggle woman.  At least, I think she’s a muggle.  It’s possible she’s a witch…”  
  


“Is she, or is she not, a witch?”  Bored.  A tone he’d heard over potions texts so often that it made him almost gasp at the clarity of his memories.

 

“I don’t think so.  I don’t know.”

 

A sigh, then, expelled impatient breath, and Harry smiled.  He couldn’t help it.

 

“Is my likely discovery of amusement to you, Potter?”

 

“No, sir,” he said, shaking his head.  But he couldn’t shake away the smile.  It was too bloody good to see the old bugger, not that he’d ever admit it.

 

“Can you see her again?”

 

Harry nodded.  

 

“Say to her the following words and watch her closely.  If she flinches, she’s a witch.  If she doesn’t, then there’s likely no harm in her.”

 

The incantation that followed was so arcane that Harry almost giggled over them, feeling rather like one of those muggle witch-hunters that Hermione had gone on about so during their second year of History of Magic.  But he didn’t laugh, for he knew what it could mean if the old woman was actually a witch, one of them.

 

“And if she is a witch?” Harry asked, already fearing the answer.

 

An eloquent shrug.   “You’re the hero,” was all he said, his sneer an ugly, beautiful thing.

 

Harry nodded again, and something in his face must have showed his resolve, for even as his hand moved to erase the sigil and end their contact, the man said, “Thank you.”

 

Harry paused in his motion, looked up into the eyes he’d truly seen for the first time only in their last, as the light had fled from them, and just nodded and cleared his throat before getting back to the business of cutting off the connection.

 

The graveyard was lonelier on the leaving, and Harry shrugged off a shiver, tucked his hands in his pockets and put his head down against a wind that had come up from the east while he’d been tarrying among the dead.

 

Back through the village he walked, back out to the edges of the fair, from which he could see that the tents were already closed, the performers moving in twos and threes toward the main tent, where he presumed they ate a communal meal.  He spotted the bent figure of the old tarot reader as she shuffled along behind the others and made to intercept her in the lee of a tent that advertised “Animals of Amazing Size!”

 

She did not see him until he was upon her, a hand like a vise on her elbow and a grimace that might have passed for a smile worn by one of the figures on her less popular cards.

 

He intoned the words without inflection and looked into her fearful face, saw her flinch and try to wrench away, saw her mouth open as if to scream.  His wand had already slid into his free hand, and he brought it up, intoned a shorter phrase, and watched as the breath caught in her throat.

 

He let her go, watched as she sank to the ground, her face a rictus of panic and pain as she struggled to draw in a breath that had been stolen from her.  Kicking free one of the stakes that held the side of the tent to the ground, Harry lifted the flap and rolled her inside, noting that the twitching was subsiding.  She was making the tiniest of sounds, like a bird trapped deep in a chimney wall.  He reached a hand into the dark and covered her mouth, pinched her nose, waited the span of several steady heartbeats of his own.

 

Rising in the twilight of late afternoon, Harry Potter wiped his hand against his pants, drove the tent stake back into the ground with the heel of his trainer, and spared a casual glance around.  No one was about.  No one had seen.

 

Still, he’d learned his lessons about discretion and valor, and he intoned a second spell without much thought, casting over the area around the tent a pall of forgetting.  By the time the spell wore off, none would remember anyone else who might have been seen around the tent, not for hours before nor hours after the woman’s unfortunate death.

 

Moving without haste back toward the village, Harry smiled a little to himself to think of what Snape would say to him once he’d heard that the threat had been eliminated.  Then he wiped the look from his face, for he was approaching the little walk-up and he knew better than to show his happiness.  He didn’t think Ron and Hermione would surmise the secret that Harry kept, but he had to be always on guard for possible discovery.

 

The next morning, Harry was greeted by a grim-faced pair, and when he inquired of them, Hermione said, “Oh, it’s awful, Harry.  The fortune teller who read your cards yesterday died!”

 

Harry, making his morning tea, let his hand jiggle a little, clattering the kettle against the cup as though startled.  “That’s a terrible bit of news,” he observed, feigning shock and joining his friends at the table in their little kitchen.

 

“Yeah, the police are saying they aren’t sure what killed her,” Ron added, giving Harry a quick glance and looking away.  “They found her in the animal tent, where she’d never have a reason to be.”

 

Harry paused in buttering a piece of toast to give Ron a closer look.  The young man’s leg was jiggling, a sure tell that he was nervous about something.

 

“Well, maybe she went in there to visit one of the animals,” Harry suggested, biting into his toast.

 

“The handlers all said she was terrified of the animals and that she wouldn’t even approach the tent,” Hermione put in, wringing her hands around her napkin.

 

Harry’s shrug was casual.  “It’s strange, but what’s it got to do with us?  She wasn’t a witch.”

 

“No, she was just a stupid muggle fortune teller,” Hermione said sadly.  “I checked, you know, just to be sure.  When we got there.  No magic-users about the place but us. Still, muggle or not, she didn’t deserve to die that way.”

 

If the news that she wasn’t a witch affected Harry at all, he didn’t let it show.  And as to his friends, well, maybe the old Harry Potter would have been more interested in the strange circumstances surrounding a muggle’s death, especially a muggle somehow associated with him, if just tangentially.  But the new Harry Potter, he of the hard eyes and harder smile, could hardly be expected to care.  So it wasn’t his indifference that made Ron stand up abruptly from the table and shout, “Where were you yesterday, Harry, after we dropped you off?  I walked the village looking for you when you weren’t back after half an hour.  I saw you coming in from the direction of the fairgrounds. Did you go back to see that gypsy?”

 

Harry pinned Ron with a slow and creeping look.  Ron’s flushed face drained and he took a step back at Harry’s glance.

  
From beside him, Hermione took in a breath as though to speak, and Harry turned the look on her.  She let her breath out in a gust and leaned back in her chair, away from him.

 

“I’ll thank you to mind your own business,” he said in a voice borrowed from the grave.

 

Hermione paled further and reached out a shaking hand, whether to console or ward off was unclear.

 

“Harry, we just want to help you.  It’s not like we think that you—“

 

“That I what?  Murdered the gypsy woman for giving me a bogus fortune?”  Harry’s laugh was harsh, humorless, a sharp and cutting sound like a slap in the tense air.

 

“No, Harry, of course we don’t think that you—“

 

“It’s just, we thought maybe you’d seen something—“

 

As his friends rushed to fill the silence with excuses, Harry let the smile slide from his face.  He took a sip of his tea, a bite of his toast, yawned and reached for the paper, opening it to the sports section, overlooking entirely the front page of the paper, which had been folded to show the news article to him.

 

The rest of the day went on rather like the first part, tense except in those moments when one or the other hurried to cover Harry’s biding and dangerous silence.

 

Mid-afternoon, Harry left the flat without a word, and Hermione and Ron, relieved to be free of the fear that their friend seemed to spread around him these days, sighed and settled on the sofa together to watch the telly and try to regroup.

 

There had been morning rain, and the road was puddled over, black pools of light catching and throwing back the grey pall of the overcast sky.  The oak was black, too, and the earth in his usual spot darker from the wetting.  He drew the sigil, blew the powder, spoke the words.

 

Snape said, “It is done?”

 

Harry bowed his head formally, and Snape smiled.  “Thank you, Harry.  Would you like to see her?”

 

Harry’s head came up sharply, and there were no words for his want, only a gasp on his lips that betrayed his eagerness.  Snape’s smile widened into something wicked, like a shark in the moment before it strikes.

 

Into the cloud came first her eyes, appearing out of the mist like twin green flames.  Then her hair, as though catching the fire, too.  Then her pale, long face and red lips, twisted not in a smile of welcome but in a sad and deep despair.

 

“She can’t speak, of course,” Snape said, shoving Lily a little forward in the frame of Harry’s sight.  “But she’s happy to see you.”

 

“Mum,” Harry breathed, straining forward like he would touch her.

 

Lily’s mouth opened on a silent wail, and she shook her head, but Harry only smiled.  “You look great, Mum.  It’s so good to see you.”

 

The wail tapered off into sobbing, but Harry had eyes only for her luminescent gaze so like his own.  Too soon, the contact was over, Snape snapping his fingers and Lily fading.

 

“My dad?” Harry asked, hoping.

 

But Snape smiled.  “I’m afraid there’s something else you’ll have to do, if you’d like to see him.”

 

Harry’s eager eyes were all the answer necessary.

 

“I’d like the record cleared about my…unfortunate…ending.”

 

Harry smiled.  “I can do that.”  Snape had given Harry so much in those final moments, so much more than just memories of his childhood.  Dumbledore wasn’t the only one to walk between worlds, after all.

 

“I want to be a hero, Harry.”

 

Harry Potter nodded, happy to oblige.  He’d tell them all what a great man Severus Snape had been; he’d make them to know that Snape had always been misunderstood, that his sacrifices were always for others, never for his own reward.  And then Harry would see his father, too, and they’d be a family again.

 

“They’ll all know the truth about you, Severus,” Harry said, smiling his promise.


End file.
